Many years ago, my Hasidic uncle, Rabbi Chaim Bukiet, taught me this particle of Talmudic logic. Two men lose something, say their wallets, at two o'clock. Both men say to themselves, "It's gone," at four o'clock. The only variable is that the first wallet was found by a stranger at three o'clock, and the second by another stranger, or even the same stranger, at five o'clock. The first wallet must indeed be returned to its original owner, but the second belongs to the lucky stranger because it has since been renounced.
I argued with my uncle, saying this was clearly unjust. The two men's situations were identical. Their loss was the same and their response to the loss was the same. Should circumstance dictate that one benefit and the other suffer? My uncle, who adhered to the letter of the law, insisted that such was the case, but eventually I understood the wisdom he couldn't articulate. The Talmud's lesson was simple: one should never give up hope.

On the other hand, hope has been a fool's game for much of 20th century Jewish history. Hope does not make you free. During the Third Reich, the only things that made Jews free were endurance and luck and, far too late to help all but a handful, the Allied army.

Recently, two further blows have been delivered to hope for a Middle East peace: the death of Faisal Husseini, one of the few strong Palestinian advocates of a sane relationship with Israel, by a heart attack, and the act of a suicide bomber who killed himself and dozens of Israeli teenagers outside a Tel Aviv disco.

Surely the time has come to say that the wallet with the peace ticket tucked inside is gone. But in that direction lies despair and, with it, doom.

Or does it? Hope is part of an emotional calibration. History, however, seldom deals in feelings. One people rides in on camels or three- masted galleons or Panzer tanks and obliterates another people and is obliterated in turn. Visigoths sack Rome and eventually disappear. Pilgrims destroy the Native American population that might very well have destroyed a prehistoric population.

Jews do not have the earliest claim on the skinny little sliver of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Before them were Canaanites as well as Hittites and Yevusites and the descendants of Anak whose cities the Bible says were "fortified, exceedingly large."

And subsequent to the Jews there were Romans, Ottomans, crusading knights and British soldiers. At one time or another, the wallet variously called Israel and Palestine has been in the pocket of any number of nations. Yet the Jews have never relinquished hope, and, no matter how secular they have become, they base their claim on my uncle's Talmudic parable.

Yet who can blame the Palestinians who found an apparently abandoned wallet and built their homes and raised their families on the rocky terrain they found next to an expired driver's license? They too have refused to give up the hope that what they believe is rightfully theirs will be returned.

When two conflicting moral orders collide, they nullify each other. Abandon hope, ye who enter here, for it is no longer a factor. At this point, the only solution to the endless Middle Eastern dilemma is political. Until the majority of people on both sides and their leaders give up the hope that suicide bombers or F-16 bombers will win the day, no one shall win. It no longer makes a difference who owned the wallet and who found it when. All that matters is that it's about time for peace.